For the past few months, the CSER group has been working frantically away on our MOOC. The CSER MOOC is designed to support primary school teachers in Australia develop fundamental skills and knowledge relating to the new digital technologies curriculum that has just been made public.
It has been a fantastic experience, and we have learnt a lot about working with the MOOC medium and course design at this level. We have also had fantastic support from our local and distant colleagues, including timely and very informative advice from others in the US and UK who have worked or who are working on similar initiatives. We have had some great discussions with the various teacher associations in Australia, and also some of the groups supporting teachers, including ACDICT, the ACS, Group X, ACARA and EdTech.
At first everything felt a little frustrating, as we had to first spend many months designing our activities and lessons before we could start filming. We created a pInterest site (http://www.pinterest.com/edresearch/ and http://www.pinterest.com/edresearch/cser-computer-science-education-research-group/), where we recorded all of our activities, and we then developed a massive table, mapping each possible activity to the learning objectives and key concepts in the curriculum. After that, we then spent weeks designing each individual lesson for each module – where each lesson is a 3-5 minute video or a web resource targeting a specific learning objective. And finally, for the past few weeks we have been able to start recording!
This has been a lot of fun, and also a learning experience – learning about lighting, green screens and appropriate recording equipment in our make shift recording studio. And also learning different software tools that we can use, but that we can also demonstrate for teachers in activities that they might want to use for their classes too, or in their own communities for sharing.
We have just sent out some of our first resources for review, and hopefully they will come back with some positive feedback! And in the meantime, until the course launches on the 22nd March, we will finish of our video resources, upload everything to coursebuilder, and wait with anticipation!
Our amazing recording studio 🙂
Katrina Falkner 